Reincarnated as Genghis Khan's Grandson, I Will Not Let It Fall-Chapter 49: The Arc Closes

The road exchange had been running long enough that Dasang’s leading rank had started to pull back. A step, then another, each one opening a meter of ground between Dasang’s front and the opposing line.

Each meter they advanced gave their eastern flank more time to complete its facing movement before Kerei arrived. The eastern arc was still dust on the steppe. Not yet in position.

Batu read it and moved forward.

He pushed through the rear of the formation, Bayan a length behind him on the left. The men in the back ranks opened without being told, reading the movement and adjusting.

He came through into the open space behind the leading rank, where the incoming shafts were no longer absorbed by the depth.

A rider two positions to his right was drawing and releasing in a steady rhythm, his horse moving at a controlled walk, the animal keeping its head low from training.

The rider drew, released, drew again without watching where the first shaft landed. He had been doing it since the exchange opened.

Batu drew his own bow.

The composite construction carried the two lives in it, the muscle memory of a body trained on horseback since it could walk and the eye of a man who had spent a previous life calculating trajectories on different equipment in different wars.

Both lives put the arrow on the same line.

He picked a rider near the center of the enemy front who was directing the eastern riders with a raised arm, a man whose removal would cost them more than any single shaft in the fighting so far.

He released at a hundred and ten meters. The shaft flew flat and the man dropped forward onto his horse’s neck and did not come back up.

He nocked again. The second shot went to the right edge of the track where two riders were angling to push around Dasang’s flank. One went down.

The third shaft he sent at the banner above the enemy center, at the point where their attention was concentrated. That line pulled back a half-step of its own, the center tightening on itself.

The rank stopped pulling back.

The rider two positions to Batu’s right caught a shaft through the upper arm and kept drawing with the other hand, the wounded arm folded across his chest, working the bow one-handed with a trained grip.

His name came from Bayan beside Batu, short and flat.

Sorgan.

The fight kept running. The enemy’s eastern flank had been turning to face the arc for several minutes, a section of the rebel riders pulling off the road angle to put their facing northeast.

The arc had not yet appeared, and a force turning to face a threat that had not yet arrived was facing away from the one that had.

Dasang’s riders sent two volleys into the exposed angle of that turning section before it completed its movement. Merin went down in the first of them. The section that had turned pulled back toward the road to reform.

Then the eastern steppe changed. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The dust out there thickened and the mingan came off the flat ground in a full front, the arc having run its full circumference and arrived.

They were inside the riders’ position before the turn could complete. The release from Kerei’s front went into the enemy’s eastern flank at close range, the range too short for accuracy to matter.

The riders there had half their number facing the wrong direction when it hit them.

The sound reached the road differently from the road fighting. Shorter, denser, the report of a fight that had compressed into a smaller space.

The road exchange dropped a beat.

On the far flank the third clan’s riders were already in contact. The western riders had read the eastern collapse forming and had driven off the road into the third clan’s line, trying to open the exit before it closed.

The headman was in it on the grey horse, his riders spread wide across the flat ground west of the road, absorbing the push with their numbers and their knowledge of the terrain under them.

Neither side had enough to break the other cleanly. The sounds from that direction were sustained, not brief, a fight that would run until something resolved it.

Bayan said one word and pointed north.

The convoy’s forward riders were on the road. Still a distance away but the dust profile was different from the engagement dust, coming south at load pace, the movement of animals on a known track.

One of their banner riders turned a horse and looked north for two seconds and then turned back.

The formation was complete. Fixed on the road. Kerei on the open steppe. The third clan on the far flank.

The track behind them filling from the north with what they had come to stop.

The center made its decision. They pulled off the road to the east in a formed body, their flanking riders covering the withdrawal.

The eastern move took their outer riders directly through the range Kerei’s arc was running. The fighting on the steppe was short and went badly for the withdrawing force.

The formed body that came off the road broke apart as the front pressed from north and east, and the men on the far edge of the withdrawal had nowhere to go that wasn’t covered.

Some pushed through to the southeast. Some did not.

That fight came apart when the road cleared. Those riders were still pressing the third clan’s line when the road fighting stopped and the formation began moving west off the road surface.

They broke south in small groups, three or four at a time, not closing ground again. The headman did not chase them. He held his line and let them go.

Sorgan’s horse went down in the last press, the animal’s legs giving out from a wound it had carried since the opening, walking on it through the whole engagement until it finally stopped.

Sorgan came off cleanly and was on his feet before Bayan reached him. He was put on a spare horse from the line.

The road was Jochid.

Dasang arrived at Batu’s position with his count.

"Forty-three dead," he said. "Sixty-four wounded. Forty of those can ride."

That was the cost of a near-equal fight on flat ground without terrain to fix them or elevation to put fire from above.

The line had held the road and the arc had arrived and the corridor had held under direct force from Berke’s riders and two clan contingents combined. Forty-three men had confirmed it.

The convoy’s lead riders came up to the formation. The load was intact. Every pack animal still loaded, the relay pairs on the flanks with their eyes on the open steppe where Kerei’s force was reforming after the pursuit.

Batu looked south down the empty track.

Berke had sent riders and two clans at the corridor and the corridor had held. Whatever those headmen had calculated when they moved against the convoy, the calculation was done and the result was on the track behind them.

Berke would get a complete account of what the corridor had produced when tested by force. He would read what the third clan’s decision meant against the two that broke, and he would read their position differently from how he had read them when he planned the move.

The next engagement, the one that actually settled what the lower river ground was worth and who held it, had to come from the south now. Across the streambed. On open ground.

Berke had no other approach left.